Popular file-sharing website, The Pirate Bay, is back online

After the Pirate Bay’s data centre – which is rumored to be located in a nuclear-proof building in a mountain somewhere near Stockholm, Sweden – was raided by authorities, many assumed the Internet’s most popular file-sharing website would be gone for good.

But Pirate Bay is online yet again, coming back a day ahead of its speculated return – Jan 31.

Since going down in December, a variety of cryptic images have graced the homepage of Pirate Bay. One featured a waving Pirate Flag, but the most recent image depicted a phoenix and a countdown clock set to end on Feb. 1, alongside several other hints that the site planned to reappear that day.

The look and feel of the new Pirate Bay is familiar to anyone who has used the site in the past. User accounts have also returned, however “Contact Us, “RSS” and “Register,” still aren’t working and result in a 404 error. The site’s recent Torrents list also indicates that the entire website’s database of torrents seems to still be intact, with the latest upload occurring on Dec 9. 2014, the same day Pirate Bay was pulled offline. On Jan. 31 and Feb. 1, Pirate Bay’s website was inaccessible on numerous occasions, presumably because traffic to the website was likely significant.

The biggest change to the website’s operations according to Torrent Freak, is the site’s staff no longer have access to Pirate Bay’s popular moderation panel. This is reportedly to streamline site management and make it harder to be brought down in the future. Pirate Bay’s moderation tools, which allowed moderators to pull fake torrents and label trusted sources, is one of the main features that helped the website become one of the most popular file-sharing sources on the internet.

This has led some former Pirate Bay staff members to launch their own version of the website. While Pirate Bay was offline, various spin-off Pirate Bay sites have been created, with Isohunt.to’s OldPirateBay.org, an archive of Pirate Bay’s hosted torrents, becoming the most notable after receiving millions of visitors a day.